Dependencies of pore pressure on elastic wave velocities and Vp/Vs ratio for thermally cracked gabbro

Abstract:

Marine seismic refraction have found that there are high Vp/Vs ratio regions in oceanic crusts at subducting oceanic plates (e.g, Cascadia subduction zone (2.0-2.8) (Audet et al., 2009)). Previous studies based on laboratory measurements indicated that Vp/Vs ratio is high when porosity and/or pore pressure is high (Christensen, 1984; Peacock et al., 2011). Although several studies have investigated the relationships between fracture distributions and Vp, Vs (e.g., Wang et al., 2012; Blake et al., 2013), the relationships for rocks (e.g., gabbro and basalt) composing oceanic crust are still unclear. This study reports the results of laboratory measurements of Vp, Vs (transmission method) at controlled confining and pore pressure and estimation of Vp/Vs ratio for thermally cracked gabbro which mimic highly fractured rocks in the high Vp/Vs ratio zone, in order to declare the dependence of fracture distributions on Vp/Vs. For the measurements, we prepared three type specimens; a non-heated intact specimen, specimens heated up to 500 °C and 700 °C for 24 hours. Porosities of intact, 500 °C and 700 °C specimens measured under the atmospheric pressure are 0.5, 3.4 and 3.5%, respectively. Measurements were conducted at a constant confining pressure of 50 MPa, with decreasing pore pressure from 49 to 0.1 MPa and then increasing to 49 MPa. While Vp/Vs for the intact specimen is almost constant at elevated pore pressure, the Vp/Vs values for the thermally cracked ones were 2.0~2.2 when pore pressure was larger than 30 MPa. In future, we will reveal the relationship between the measured elastic wave velocities and the characteristics of the microfracture distribution.

This work was supported by JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (Grant Number 26400492).